The Principles of Cow Protection: Part II
Principle 4: Bulls not engaged in a breeding programme should be trained in a respectful manner and their abilities be utilised in a meaningful way (e.g. ploughing).
Boys of all species of farm animal get the short end of the stick. Female animals provide the things that people like to eat, such as milk, but even more importantly they produce young and so keep the herd or flock growing without the farmer having to constantly buy new animals. For the same reason, breeding males do have some value in modern farming and so usually escape the early demise of their brothers. One of our aims at New Gokul is to show that Krishna designed a specific human-cow-ox relationship, and the job of the oxen is to work the land.
Before the industrial revolution in the 1800s, animals were used for draught (power and pulling) for centuries. The picture below is from the 14th century (I got it from this page, where you can read more about Medieval life) and shows two farmers ploughing with a team of four oxen. Obviously, the bigger the ox the stronger he is and oxen do not stop growing until they are 7 years old, so it follows logically that farmers did not slaughter their oxen until they were too old to work efficiently. Whilst it is still abhorrent to kill an animal that has faithfully helped you bring in the harvest for 7 or more years, it is at least proof that until very recent years, male bovines had a lot of value to farmers.
Unfortunately tractors, combine harvesters and other machines came along and displaced the ox and the draught horse. This was bad news for people as suddenly a lot less labourers needed to be employed at farms and were cheerfully dismissed, often to a life of hardship in the workhouse followed by a slow but untimely death. It was bad news for the environment as the machines needed fuel. In the early days of the revolution London was so dark in the daytime, due to pollution fog, that people had to light matches to read street signs in the afternoon. It was also bad news for bulls, because tractors are much faster and much cheaper to run. Now it is very uncommon for a bull to reach 1 year old. Many are shot at birth, sometimes in front of their distraught mothers, and most of the rest are sent to veal crates to be fattened up for a few months before slaughter. The only ones that get to live a few years are bulls reserved for breeding. Very few are saved for this purpose because of the prevalance of artificial insemination. This technology allows semen to be harvested from a prize bull and kept, frozen, for years. The bull can therefore be killed as soon as the semen is taken.
So, we can see, there is a big need to engage oxen in a meaningful way. We could just keep them and raise them for the pure pleasure of knowing them, wonderful boys as they are, but hardly a farmer in the West will feed a huge animal for 18+ years out of the kindness of their heart. We need to show that there is a way we can engage them which is not only practical but profitable too. If you look at it in purely financial terms, we will never convince them. You have to counter in the benefits to the environment, which is very hard to put a number on, but will have infinite value to future generations. There is also the benefit of the large amounts of dung the oxen produce, which is a wonderful organic fertiliser. Lastly and even harder to quantify is the benefits to society. Gandhi said you can measure the morality of a society by how they treat their animals, and it doesn't say much for us that we kill newborn babies because we don't value their lives above the cost of meat.
So all our boys work in some capacity. They begin training at 3-4 years old when they are big enough to take a yoke. We start off very gently, by introducing them to the place where they are yoked up and showing them that they get nice food when they go there. Then we start putting on the equipment to get them used to the feel of it. When they are comfortable in the yoke we will take them and walk them around, and eventually they will begin light work such as taking the rubbish trailer to the bins. The hardest work like potato ridging and ploughing is kept for the larger and better trained bulls.
The exceptions to this rule are our handsome bulls Kamadeva and Govinda. Syamasundara jokes that Kamadeva is the only one at this farm who never does any work, but actually he works twofold - producing dung like all the others, and making children to keep our project growing. And very nice children they are too.
